Today we see that author-publishers are accountable for layout as well as grammar. That’s what the “publisher” part of the job title is all about.
What I gleaned about the story: Some kind of underworld drug buy goes wrong, except it’s contraband magic instead of drugs, and the people involved aren’t people. At least, not the human kind.
Find this book on Amazon.
Note: Fabulous cover layout, although the crow is easy to miss, and without it, the scene slips into plain urban, or possibly noir, rather than urban fantasy.
Technical Note: The ebook file is 800K in size, and as I’ve said before, if the book isn’t illustrated or packed with custom fonts or media, it shouldn’t be any more than 500K. At 800K it isn’t a monster, but it could easily go on a diet. And in fact, when I let Calibre auto-convert it, the resulting EPUB file was only 240K.
Analysis: The first and second paragraphs echo on “I” and they veer fairly close to galloping I disease, too, but then it eases up.
Analysis: There’s a very distracting issue going on in the layout. It happens on the second page, and then again on the third. The paragraph beginning “I smirked and took my time” has a noticeably different indentation, and it happens again on the next page, with the sentence headed with, “I gritted my teeth.”
What was different about the indentation? Well, that depends on which e-reader you use. In my case, the indent was entirely missing. Which means that while most paragraphs were properly indented, several at random were fully left justified. And brother, that kind of layout glitch gets your attention like a lamprey on your face. It didn’t make the file unreadable, but it was a total immersion buster the first time I hit it. If it had only happened the one time, I might have let it slide, but it happened again on the next page too, which made it a pattern, so then I jumped ahead to see if it continued on every page ahead. Fortunately, I didn’t see any more of them, but even so, immersion had clearly broken.
But it’s possible that most people won’t see this problem the way I did, because I do my IOD reading on the Calibre ebook viewer. (It’s one of the only reader programs that will render both EPUB and Kindle files.) So to be sure it wasn’t just a Calibre glitch, I checked it in my Kindle for PC and and then on my Kindle for Android too. In those readers, the problem wasn’t as severe, but those two paragraphs still had abnormally narrow indents. About half the width, which is enough to call attention to it and make the reader wonder why those paragraphs are done differently. And a reader scratching his head over layout issues is not immersed.
Analysis: The second chapter opens with three consecutive “I”-headed paragraphs, and the galloping I disease is getting hard to ignore.
Note: This is shaping up to be a good yarn, but the echo chamber effect kept throwing me out. If not for that one recurring issue, I might have gone a lot farther.
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1: When you drop a Word file into Kindle, there is a LOT of bloat in the resulting mobi file. (And if you’re not comfortable futzing around with Calibre to make an epub to drop into the Kindle converter… Not much you can do about it. …I may be giving some compression a try later, once I see whether it worked on my biggest book.)
2: If you’re using Word for the Mac, and you drop it into the converter… Well, at one point there was a bug that made indentation go weird on some paragraphs, semi-randomly. Might’ve had something to do with short sentences. (Finding this drove me to tears for a while. The bug was NOT in the master-copy, but it kept showing up whenever I dropped the document in for conversion. Finally I pulled out the HTML Kindle generated, found the error, fixed it, and dropped the HTML back into the converter, whereupon the thing worked again.)
Neither of which are excuses, but both are pit traps for people who are doing their own conversion-work and assuming the Zon will take care of them. (Instead, they’ll happily charge “transmission fees” for the bloated files they generate, and their “support” had no clue what was causing the indentation weirdness. My spouse was the one who finally found a comment about it, so we knew what was causing it.)
You’re right, Elizabeth. These are some common sources of file bloat, but as you point out, they are not excuses. The root cause of file bloat is the same as the root cause of bad covers, atrocious spelling, horrible layout, etc.: irresponsible, negligent, oblivious or simply incompetent publishing. And any authors whose works are produced that way should demand more from their publishers — even if the publishers are themselves.